It starts with steel framework appearing in the middle of Adelaide's Parklands some time during December, the first inkling that the city's famous festival period is drawing near.

And it doesn't take long for this curiosity for passing commuters to become a construction site that transforms Victoria Park into the Adelaide 500 racetrack.

Once finished, it will occupy 609,500 square metres of space, utilise 1,907 concrete barriers and provide a playground for about 270,000 people over four days, that are widely appreciated as a carnival rather than just a car race.

The 500 will be the noisiest installation of the city's Mad March festival period — burning rubber from February 28 to March 3 just a stone's throw from the Adelaide Fringe, the Adelaide Festival, Writers' Week and Womadelaide.

Guiding this monumental 11-week task is Integrated Event Delivery Management (IEDM) director Tom Prest, who draws from 200 different construction plans for various components of the site with the aid of 24 project managers.

He said they started with the pit building, which was "probably the biggest temporary structure built in Australia", because it was the most complicated task.

"Along with the main pit straight grandstand ... we essentially work backwards from there."

Minimising a big footprint

The pit building and other State Government-owned assets like shade structures, barriers and overpass bridges are trucked in from a massive warehouse at Kilburn.

The storage space is needed to support a 3.2-kilometre track that will eventually unfurl from Victoria Park into a "super loop" across the city's east.

Its concrete barriers will be equipped with nearly eight kilometres of fencing, which itself will be dwarfed by the 31.5 kilometres of temporary fencing installed throughout the racing precinct.

Sections of Victoria Park are progressively closed during the build in five different stages.

"It's a week-by-week approach to the space we occupy, so we obviously try and minimise our footprint as much as possible to leave as many paths and open spaces to the community as we can," Mr Prest said.

Nearby roads are closed in a staggered process during the final week, including parts of East Terrace, Wakefield and Flinders streets from 6:00am Saturday, before Bartels Road and parts of Hutt Street are also closed from 10:00am Monday.

A slight reconfiguration of the racetrack this year will bring stands closer to the action and remove the adjacent Britannia roundabout from the site.

Construction of the Dequetteville grandstand, meanwhile, will not start until after the Saturday road closures to avoid any need for lane restrictions up until then.

"Once you've been in the project for long enough, you have enough ability to understand the best way to build it," Mr Prest said.

"The benefits of that have been the consolidation of the infrastructure."

Track needs tick of approval

Deadline for the racetrack build, which was originally designed in a larger format for Australia's first official Formula 1 world championship race in 1985, is 5:00pm Tuesday.

More than 10,000 pieces of furniture will be brought in for the event, 23 big screens installed and 1.15 hectares of temporary flooring installed.

The most important thing, however, is the racetrack itself, for which a package of drawings must be submitted to the Federation Internationale de L'Automobile (FIA) so motorsport's governing body can approve the configuration and geometry.

On Tuesday morning a race director from the Confederation of Australian Motor Sports (CAMS) will arrive to conduct an inspection of the track and issue its licence.

"They might come to the site and say, 'look, actually we'd like a few more tyre barriers here', or they might want to make some final adjustments," Mr Prest said.

"That inspection happens Tuesday morning ... add a bit here, do a bit there, but it's never been anything that has risked the event gates not opening on Thursday as scheduled and the motorsport starting."

Hundreds of thousands of car lovers will be joined by corporate types, models, families and music lovers eager to see the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Living End in nightly concerts after the racing.

They'll infiltrate local pubs, fill seats at shows in the Adelaide Fringe and spend their money happily and in good spirit, despite the predictable stereotyping of single-minded art festival goers wishing the petrol heads would party somewhere else.

But for Mr Prest and his team, there is no rest and no relaxation, not yet.

The contractors go into caretaker mode, inspecting structures every morning of the racing festival, making sure toilets are serviced, and retaining a standby crew in the event of track crashes.

"If there's a car crash at turn one, for example, and the barriers get moved and the tyre stack gets split open, we've got people on standby to go and repair as required to get the racing to recommence."

Track dismantled in six weeks

As soon as the race finishes on Sunday, the team prepares to dismantle the track over the next six weeks, starting with ensuring most roads could be reopened by 5:00pm Monday.

"When we [IEDM] first took over as a project managers six years ago, we inherited a project where a lot of the supply agreements were signed at a 14-week build and a nine-week dismantle duration, so it would be a 23-week build phase plus the event time," Mr Prest said.

"Over the last five of six years, we've reduced that to an 11-week build period and six-week duration, so we're now back to a 17-week occupation on the site."

The team acts in reverse, deconstructing the site and trucking items back to the Kilburn warehouse to be packed in the same order they were removed.

Slowly, yet surely, the site settles back onto the grass so that by about mid-April any lingering traces of Adelaide's festival season are gone, along with summer.

The city retreats into what is commonly described as hibernation by locals, and Australian rules football takes over as the population's main focus, although that's another story.

Asked if he ever felt the pressure of ensuring everything came together on time, Mr Prest said he focused on critical things, such as "certification, compliance, and making sure your track geometry is right".

"If you asked me three years ago, I would have said 'yes', but now I've actually done the project enough times to get a good understanding of where risk is in the project and where to put your time and resources to make sure you manage the critical infrastructure as well as you can," he said.

"If a pot plant is in the wrong spot when the gates open on Thursday at 9:00am, everything's going to be OK. We can move the pot plant."

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